Halloween

 I'll be honest, my brain has already moved to Christmas - my favourite time of year. But Halloween is the first step nearer.

I'm very aware that son is now all grown up and chances that he'll want to get involved with anything are slim and so whenever he does I grab it with both hands.

Since he has been really small we've gone to Sompting Farm to select our pumpkins. The first time I pushed the wheelbarrow through the field and he sat in the wheelbarrow. The next time he was a bit to heavy for the wheelbarrow so walked along beside me, then he got older and he took one handle of the wheelbarrow and I took the other, with me taking over when it got too heavy.

Now I just wander along whilst he manages the barrow - though he drew a line at me getting into the wheelbarrow, which was disappointing.

Until this year his mission has always been to find the biggest pumpkin that he possibly could. This year was different, for starters we were a little later than normal and the pumpkins on offer where sparse. He also decided what he wanted to do was go for weird shaped pumpkins (which I am sure was thrilling to the people that own the farm - they managed to get rid of them). My mission is always to get pumpkins that will make good soup - so basically no pumpkins at all. I look for the small yellow ones, that are probably a squash. I also like the odd knobbly ones that look a bit like a penis and balls. Always makes me laugh - why wouldn't it!

This year the farm had also diversified it's crops and half of the pumpkin field was a sunflower field. Obviously the season for that is over so they were all dried up. Inside the Sunflowers were the most terrifying scarecrows I  have ever seen. Honestly they were the stuff that a lifetime of nightmares are made of.

I looked at all the small kids picking pumpkins and wondered how many of them were destined to have a few bad night's sleep for a few weeks. But none of them actually seemed to give a damn.

Pumpkins selected we headed for the cash desk. They gave me my quote for my pumpkins. £45!!!!! I swore and immediately started putting a few of them to one side to bring down the cost. The girl quoting on the pumpkins then started to drop the price, every time I raised an eyebrow another £2 came off. In the end we got our pumpkins for £30 - rediculous.

The thing about Sompting was that up until this year it was always really good value compared to many other farms. Plus they had things like a coffee tent and drawing opportunities for kids. Suddenly this year they had all new wheelbarrows (that they were clearly trying to claw back the price on) and all the coffee tents and colouring in had gone. They had just gone for hard profit.

Don't get me wrong, I know it's hard for farmers these days, but this pumpkin thing is easy money. They don't even need to harvest them because people come and do it for them. But trebling the price seems a bit of a stretch. Normally we get a good bounty for about £15 - so it really was a huge hike.

I'll still go next year if son want's to - it's always joyful doing things with him. But I'm just glad I'm not at the start of the pumpkin journey. EVERYTHING is just flying up in price. There are items in my shopping basket we get every week. Some of those have gone up by 75% in the past 2 years. The only thing that's not going up is my salary - it is certainly getting tough to keep financial head above water right now.

When we got home from the pumpkin field son wanted to go gaming with his friends online, so I focussed on my pumpkin soup. We ended up with a huge vat of it. Seemed like a good idea at the time. We all had a cup (it wasn't very nice). Needless to say in the end the huge vat of pumpkin soup went mouldy and went down the drain. I do like the concept of pumpkin soup - just not the reality.

On Thursday son and I carved the pumpkins - we actually did this in super record time, because he was busy with something. So I think we knocked them out in about 30 minutes flat.

Friday we did the setup for Halloween. A terracotta pumpkin and skull and the pumpkins that we'd carved. All with tea lights inside. 

I do love it when the little kids turn up they are so cute. I'm not so fond of the teenagers, who want to trick or treat but because they are with their friends at the same time they pretend they are too cool for it. They can all s*d off as far as I'm concerned.

Extra fun was added to the event because we had our new ring doorbell on for the first time. Literally couldn't hear the bell ring once. The only way I knew there was somebody there was because the dog went mental. I think we've still got some setup to do with that.

The other thing I got around to doing is my passport application. This is normally a nightmare because my dad was in the army so I wasn't born in the UK. Also my dad is from New Zealand and when young came to England to join the British Army. So when you get asked the question 'where you born in Britain' [No], were your parents born in Britain [No]. You end up going down a rabbit hole for hours.

Credit to the process, this time around it was so much easier. I did it all online and there wasn't a single rabbit hole. I guess that the country is a lot more used to people not being born in the country or whose parents were not born in the country than they were 30 years ago. The only thing that leaves me with concern is that I understand they need a a referee for your digital photo. I had this all set up and agreed, but I didn't spot anywhere on the form for me to share this information. I wait to see what happens around this.

On Saturday I had booked son in for a flu jab at Asda (an odd thing, but it's the easiest location around here). Whilst he was there I thought I'd get a passport photo taken rather than go through the trauma of getting it done at home. The passport photo booths had changed a lot since the last time I was there. The seat was fixed, there was no curtain so you could have a pretty colour behind you and for the life of me I couldn't work out how to actually start the process to get a photo taken.

I had to go out and get son in to show me how to get it started - embarrassing - but necessary. You had 9 attempts at your digital photo, the first one was taken and it was..... horrific - it put on about a stone, showed every wrinkle and gave me a terrible double chin. I took the second one, a tiny bit better, but not much. I really needed to do the old woman's trick of looking up slightly at the camera to hide the wrinkles and double chin, but couldn't because the seat was fixed.

In the end I ended up crunching in at the waist to try to lose a few inches of body so I could raise my head for the camera. It's a good thing that the photo was only from the neck up. On the subject of neck up - as this was going to be for the next 10 years I chose my jewellery carefully. I put on a lovely necklace my husband bought me for my anniversary and selected matching earrings.

In the end the necklace never made it to the photo and the earrings just looked over large. Hey ho, I at least tried.

Back to the photo with the crunched waist and me slanting my neck up slightly to try to get some chin definition. The photo was horrific, but by then I was getting cramp from the position I was in. So I thought 'sod it' and just went with that one.

We always look horrific in our passport photos as a family. Son always looks terrified, husband looks angry and I look tired. Perhaps the passport actually shows the real us as that's a pretty reasonable assessment of how we go about our daily life.

Anyway, until next week tara!